Consider this my review for HBP

[trinityvixen]

I can't really say that this wouldn't be a great idea. Obviously, we'd need a break of about a decade or two, and I don't think this could be reliably done with live action unless a lot of things about doing television change any time soon. But an animated series would be good, and it would do better than the films have done.

As for Half-Blood Prince, what can I say? I did not like the book. I think the movie missed a lot of points of emotional resonance--it felt rather like it was hitting marks, but not making me care that it did. I had a sorta similar reaction to this as I did to the Wolverine movie; I knew what was coming, and I couldn't get that excited about it. At least they managed to make the romance subplots somewhat bearable. I also credit Tom Felton with making me care, at all, about poor widdle Draco Malfoy. I don't think JK Rowling did half so well by him in the book, but she was hindered by not being able to show things he was doing from his own point of view. The movie, wisely, showed just how scary it was for him to be doing evil work. I did kind of pity him. Effective distraction, but still a distraction.

Comments

[chuckro.livejournal.com]

the movies give the story the short shrift and often require the audience to have read the books to follow along.

Honestly? I never had this problem. I read book 3 (and watched movies 3, 5 and 6) and haven't had any problems following along. Hell, I haven't even needed most of the stuff I picked up from cultural osmosis.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

We had someone with us for this one who'd never read the books, and he was sort of lost. Granted, he also fell asleep during the movie, which didn't help. But past about book 3? I'd say you'd have to read them to get a better idea of the story.

Part of the problem is, of course, that the movies left out things that they didn't know were going to be needed later. (Horcruxes, for example, were around but invisible prior to book 6.) While I was able to see movies for 1 and 2 without difficulty, there's a real turning point by 3-4 that makes it such that you would benefit from having read the books. I concede that those books didn't need to be quite as huge as they were (4 and 5 particularly), but there was a lot more subtlety and richness to the layering of life and story to them.

Which would lend itself better to a TV season with twenty-odd hours to go into things like Neville Longbottom's reasons for trying so hard to be a genius rebel wizard like the trio. Or the extended Weasley family. Or the woes of Professor Lupin. And so on. These are perhaps non-essential to the story of Harry Potter, but the books make it clear that it shouldn't be all about Harry. These other characters have just as interesting stories and they occasionally affect the story. Without time to go into them in a movie, you work around them, often to a lesser effect.